Raquo!

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 1, 2006

Filed under: Rants 7 comments

Steven points out in the comments of the previous post that the » isn’t working in Firefox. Arg. I suppose my site has always been like that for him, since that symbol isn’t a recent addition.

Here is what everyone “should” see:

And for the curious, this is what the site looks like on my machine, although I expect that the handwriting font only works for IE on Windows machines.

I hasten to add that ‘ol raquo and some of the other special chars were part of the original WordPress theme, to which I added all the stuff for my site. I assumed that the stuff they had would be fairly portable.

Sigh.

I can’t tolerate the thought of having my HTML showing in some browsers, so I’m going to have to fix this. But those special chars are used stinkin’ EVERYWHERE. This is going to take a while to clean up.

LATER: Ok, so I have Firefox up and running on my secondary machine. Seems like raquo works in some places and not others. Looks like the big problem is that firefox doesn’t like the way raquo is used as the bullet in a bullet list in the CSS. This is a stupid problem, since the bullets aren’t supposed to show up anyway. Grumble grumble….

MORE LATERER: Looks like it’s fixed. Looks good on a fresh install of Firefox, anyway. I’m thinking of getting rid of the handwriting font. It’s cool, but it only works in IE and it seems a bit gimmicky. I don’t know. Meh.

I didn’t try Opera, but nothing EVER looks right on opera to me.

 


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7 thoughts on “Raquo!

  1. smapdi says:

    I don’t get it… I’ve never seen a bad raquo on your site, and I use Firefox exclusively. (I thought I saw a messed up raquo in this post, but I checked the code and you’d done that on purpose with &amp.) My own site has them all over the place, and they show up fine as well. Perhaps it has something to do with installed extensions?

  2. Shamus says:

    I can’t explain it either. I just did a fresh install of Firefox on an XP machine and saw the “raquo”s. However, a few weeks ago I had another FF / XP machine that did NOT see them, which is why I didn’t know about them. Wait – I just realized I’m talking about the same machine. Start over:

    HP machine with XP running Firefox: Did not see raquos.

    Then I wiped the hard drive and re-installed XP. Today I installed FF and behold! The raquos appeared.

    But none of this explains to me: What the heck are those for? They were part of this wordpress theme from the start. They do not show up at all in IE, and in FF they either appear as raquo or not at all. In no test case have I ever seen them appear as arrows, which is what the original author clearly intended.

    Strange.

  3. mark says:

    For what it’s worth, I’ve had similar issues with Opera 8.5. Currently, nothing is showing up where the raquos are supposed to be (similar to your screenshot). I used to have this problem where the white background of your page would just stop halfway through, but that dissappeared soon after I discovered your blog…

    I’ll also note that you’re not the first person who’s expressed bafflement at the default wordpress templates, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head (ESR maybe?)…

  4. mark says:

    Also, the “Previous” and “Next” links seem to be buggy as well. For instance, on this entry, I see that the previous entry is “HP Pavillion Sucks,” a post that is almost two weeks old…

    And as long as we’re tearing apart website designs, the placement of those Previous and Next links could use some work too. It’s nice from an aesthetic standpoint, but because of its placement and the size of the text, I often find myself thinking that it’s a headline of your entry (or a subhead). It’s a little disorienting.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, this little exercise has reminded me that I need to fix about a million usability problems on my own blog:P

  5. Shamus says:

    Mark hath spake:
    Now if you'll excuse me, this little exercise has reminded me that I need to fix about a million usability problems on my own blog:P

    Your trackbacks never work for me. :)

    The Prev / Next jump to the next post in the same category. They are a leftover from when this blog was mostly about D&D and I was posting our campaign. The prev / next were handy for reading through the story and skipping non-story posts. Now that you’ve brought it up, I don’t see much of a need for them any longer (certainly not the prev, anyway) and you are right: Those labels are huge.

  6. mark says:

    Ah trackbacks, bane of my existence. It seems that the spammers love to bang away at my trackback system. It apparently got so bad that my web hosting service disabled it for me because it “was causing the server to become slow and unstable for other users on the system.” The most annoying thing (which I believe you’ve written about before) is that Movable Type’s SpamLookup plugin catches all of the trackback spam sent my way, so none of it is displayed (and the grand majority of it is “junked” so I don’t even have to moderate them). You’d think the spammers would take the hint and stop banging away!

  7. AndrewNZachsDad says:

    Shamus, just in case you are reading these still: I noticed that some of your Prev/Next links redirect readers into other streams. Specifically, reading the first listed Rant (the one about Steam) the links default to the Video Game category. I see that the blog entry is listed in both categories so I’m sure you lost sleep over which one you wanted to include it in, but I thought I’d bring it up. Any way to add an additional set of Prev/Next links for those?
    Btw, I was introduced to your blog through your campaign story, then hooked by DM of The Rings. Now reading these fantastic entries I feel a certain level of kinship with your quest to balance your marriage, faith, family and geekhood. I must admit, though, that you seem much better at it than I. And, I’m enjoying the novel, too!
    (Heather, I’m sorry if the adoration of his “legions” of fans is making young Shamus insufferable to live with. Although, you seem the kind of lady to make sure he remembers his responsibilities on Earth.)

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